Interesting trend in the Emmy awards

[Flint]

I realize that a large portion of what goes into winning an Emmy is more about marketing to the voters rather than people just watching all the nominees and voting their minds... but... it is interesting that not only most of the winners from non-major network shows, but nearly all the nominees are as well.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/li.../item/creative-arts-emmys-2016-writing-926794

With the amounts of money the four major TV networks have and the distribution they control, why can't they make a good, respectable show?

 

[Haywood]

With the amounts of money the four major TV networks have and the distribution they control, why can't they make a good, respectable show?

Because they are still making the same tired old crap they've been airing for years. Oh look its another police drama, hospital drama, lawyer drama, detective drama, family sit-com or ensemble sit-com. Yay. Let's just keep recycling the same old tropes over and over and over again until people realizing that it is all the same half-dozen shows with different names, actors and locations. Yawn.

 

[TKoP]

A few reasons... because of their size, they have to pander to the lowest common denominator. It can't be too "smart" like a cable or pay-tv show can be.

They self censor themselves -- they can't write something too "gritty" like, again, a cable/pay-tv show can.

Also, the can't take risks -- the good shows we have right now were all a risk of some sort another. Game of Thrones costs too much for a genre piece that wasn't already popular. Walking Dead -- too gritty/gory for main TV and there was no Zombie presence at the time. Breaking Bad -- a tv program where the main character is a drug dealer?

When they do try to break into these niches, I'm sure all the originality gets killed in the various committees I'm sure they have for these kinds of things.

 

[Haywood]

They don't need to have gore or profanity to do something out of the box. Look at the show Halt and Catch Fire on AMC. Its a period drama set in the nascent PC industry of the early 1980s and it is absolutely fantastic My wife and I have been binge watching to catch up and watching several straight hours of it is effortless. I agree with all of the issues TKoP listed, but some of the problem is an utter lack of creative thinking and every time the networks stumble into something vaguely original, they immediately move it to a shitty time slot and cancel it after no more than a season. Meanwhile, they crank out spin-offs of old shows and we get subjected to complete abortions like CSI: Miami for years.